HOW IT WORKS IN JUNIOR HIGH

I was leaving work one day during my first few months in Japan, casually waving good-bye to my manager, probably fumbling in my wallet, looking for my train pass, when I first learned about cultural miscommunication.

I waved good-bye, see.

She waved good-bye back.

So I thought.

Only she wasn't waving good-bye. In Japan, when you do that little 'bye-bye' wave that children do, that doesn't mean see you later, alligator -- it means get your ass over here, I need to talk to you, now.

Which didn't put me in my manager's good books, me walking away and all.


Another, Cambodian example:

I noticed that two of the assignments I received from my students at the University of Cambodia (www.uc.edu.kh) were the same. Identically. Precisely. (This was before I knew that Cambodian students really, really, reaaalllllllllly like to cheat, plagairize, copy, if given the chance; I think it might be mandatory here, actually, in the Constitution and everything.)

I gathered the offenders after class. I held the papers in front of their faces to indicate the seriousness of their offence. I then proceeded to rip the assignments in half, to let them know that I would not, could not tolerate an offence of this magnitude.

At which point they smiled and then laughed.

(And I went: Hmmm. Something's not working here. I'm obviously not as intimidating as I want to be. Not exactly Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me...)

The thing is, when Cambodians get nervous, they smile and laugh and get that aw-shucks grin on their faces. That's just the way they react to events that are somewhat troubling. (Or how they react to foreigners in that situation, anyways.)

Some may accuse me of cultural stereotyping, to which I can only respond by saying that anyone thinking that must never have travelled in a foreign country. I've slowly realized that specific countries and cultures do have common physical, social characteristics. Most Japanese are shy and nervous around strangers; most Canadians are a little modest, not willing to reveal too much of themselves right away, while many Americans are boisterous and aggressive and confident and arrogant.

Notice I said 'most'. The distinction to be made, of course, is that people are people and individ-uals will always be individuals. I've met Japanese more zany than Jerry Lewis, and Americans that are modest and reticent and define the word 'wallflower'.

But you can't deny that the culture you're raised in shapes you, molds you, and conditions, to a certain extent, youre way of thinking. The only way to recognize this fact is to exit, stage right, your bubble of comfort, and see what the new land (where ever it may be) offers.

Look, foreign countries are all just bigger versions of junior high. They really are. You're not sure where you're going, the place is large and seemingly, windingly endless, and there's all these posters and banners for organizations that seem to be cool and interesting if you only could understand what they're all about, and everybody else, the veterans and the novices like yourself, seem to have a better grasp on everything than you do. That's just how it works in the beginning.

All you have to do is stay and wander around for a bit. If you do, you will begin to figure things out, or some things, anyway, and you will be witness to your own personality, thoughts, impressions; you will be an observer to your own reactions. Your old, culturally bred thoughts may not have much relevance in this strange and distant land. The cultural communication and shorthand you once relied upon for connections just doesn't work any more. You may have thought it kind of odd, if not disturbing, that in the final few seasons of Different Strokes Arnold and Willis and Kimberly (r.i.p.) suddenly had a new little red-headed stepbrother shoved into the family, probably because Gary Coleman was losing his 'cuteness' quotient, but you ain't going to find many people to argue that point with in Japan or Cambodia. (Come to think of it, maybe nobody would argue that point back home, either. I still think it's an issue worth at least discussing, if not resolving, but that's just me, maybe...)

The point is, I'm not trying to get all Socraticish or Dr.Philish here. But if you allow your mind to be opened, if you go to that new restaurant or walk down that odd street or hop on the Tuesday night red-eye to Belgium, you will find your mind and personality and self adapting to the world around you, and marvelling at the way that same world bends and sways with the force of your own intent.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Happy New Year to all friends and family (and strangers, too...)!

Here's hoping that 2005 gives you everything you need, and a little of what you want.


"Life is either a daily adventure or nothing."


-- Helen Keller

ONCE A WEEK

Have you ever seen a dead body? Up close and on the ground?

I went twenty-eight years without seeing one, and then here in Cambodia I saw two within a month.

I was on the back of a moto with a friend heading home late one night, and the moto driver motioned towards the river.

"Dead body there," he said. "Dead body. You go see?"

So we kind of shrugged and said sure, why not. We thought we were going to see the place where the guy died, not the guy himself.

We wrong. A small crowd had gathered by the side of the road, as Cambodians are known to do. As we slowly drove past, we could see somebody on the ground, a pool of blood surrounding his head. He wasn't moving. He was dead.

Okay, fine, that's enough, back home, had a blast, go, now.

And that was that. Five, six seconds was all it was. But enough time to recognize that most human of conditions, the one we all instictively shy away from and are drawn towards, almost against are will. We don't want to think about death, or so we say, but the bootleg videos of those kidnapped hostages in Iraq getting their heads chopped off are doing big business here in Phnom Penh.

Did I want to see a dead guy by the side of the road? I guess I did.

A few weeks later I was out for a run, jogging past the Cal-Tex gas station when I saw, surprise surprise, another small crowd gathering. I slowed my run to a shuffle, and then to a stop. I poked my head through the cluster of moto drivers and mothers.

How old was he? Eight years old. Maybe nine. His body splayed out in a weird, contorted tangle -- left arm up here, right arm down there. His eyes were closed, giving him the gentle look of children who have somehow got themselves all bunched up in their sleep.

Only this kid wasn't waking up. His skin was dirty, his clothes shoddy, his hair a mess. Most likely one of those street kids that always ask me for money when I go to Star Mart, the variety store located next to the gas pumps. Had I met this one before?

Hard to say.

A car must have struck him, but there was no car in sight, no concerned, weeping driver begging for forgiveness. (Did he drive away fast? Did he feel the thump? Did he even glance over his shoulder, or into the rear view mirror?)

I guess it's a cliche to state that life over here is cheap, fragile, blunt.

Shootings happen back home, and kids are hit by cars, and the world moves on.

The thing is, most cliches have at least a sliver of truth to them. Death seems to loom larger here than elsewhere. Life itself here seems to be more, I don't know, susceptible. To what? To everything. If you're shot, guess what? Not many hospitals to take you in. If you're a street kid hit by a car, now what? Not many people are going to pick you up and haul you off for medical care. You're not on your own here, no, but the social structures we take for granted are somewhat...distant.

It's been awhile since I've seen those bodies -- five months, maybe six?

I probably think about them once a week.

SOMETHING ABOUT THE SUNLIGHT

It might have been the way that the early-evening sunlight painted the sky a dark and subtle amber over the dusty streets. It could have been the constant news of the tsunami's toll, a barrage of non-stop death. The root of it doesn't matter. What matters is that I found myself on the back of a moto in Phnom Penh suddenly remembering a chocolate milkshake I drank, God, must have been eleven, twelve years ago now.

Memories have a way of unleashing themselves upon you whether you're ready or not. (You're usually not.) There's no rhyme or reason (or so we believe.) They come, and you have no choice; rejection is not an option.

And here was this one, like it or not, a remembrance of a day at the cottage our family used to go to each summer along with our life-long family friends, the Craddocks. Near the cottage was a general store, presided over by a middle-aged woman who had the biggest moustache I've ever seen on a lady. A black and fertile centipede, this was. The fact that this woman was supposedly married, well, we couldn't believe it. Didn't want to believe it, because then that meant that there was somebody who, like, kissed her goodnight, potentially more than once. (Did it tickle, that moustache of hers? I'm betting it did...)

She couldn't keep us away, though, because at this store they had milkshakes, see, thick ones, monstrous ones, the kind that you can sip and slurp for a long, long time before even reaching the beginning of the end.

On this day I went and grabbed a shake with Tony, a big, funny, good-natured Italian kid who was a friend of my buddy Jason. (Tony had tagged along with Jason's family the past few years and joined us for a week or two at the cottage.) I don't know where Jason was at particular moment; maybe down by the beach, maybe napping, maybe watching the tube. Nobody else was around, I guess, so me and Tony decided to get a drink of that blissful chocolate nectar. I was, what, maybe seventeen? And Tony fifteen, I guess. That week (or had it been the year before?) he lost his wallet with all his vacation money inside, and so we all spent a lot of time scouring the beach and the cars and the cottages looking for the missing loot.

No luck.

Ah, well. He wouldn't go hungry this week, not with all the food we had, and the milkshakes were cheap, so what the hell.

I don't remember much about that particular moment. Just the two of us walking towards the general store, the sun slowly setting in the late-afternoon, mid-summer sky. Looking foward to the shakes. Making the kind of small talk you make with people you know, but not that well.

I don't think I ever saw Tony again after that week at the cottage. He died a couple of years later, killed in a car accident with one of his best friends. Somebody had fallen asleep at the wheel one night as they were driving back from Casino Niagara.

They were barely into their twenties. A double funeral for the two of them in Fort Erie.

Strange, the way the mind works. In the centre of Cambodia, ten, eleven years on, and something about the sunlight triggered an image, a flash, of a moment in time. Two Canadian teenagers going to grab a shake as dusk starts to fall.

Ten years on, one of them in Cambodia, the other gone. Gone for good. I've already lived a good five or six more years than Tony ever lived, come to think of it, and that's a scary, sobering thought. The kind of thought you don't know what to do with it.

There's nothing to do with it, I guess. You latch on to what you remember about a person -- the fact that he lost his wallet, the fact that he played a pretty good game of beach volleyball, the fact that we all went out one summer night on the boat and got together at the cottage of a couple of girls that we had met a few days before, a bunch of nervous teenagers sitting under a wide sky, in front of a blazing fire, making inane jokes. Those kinds of thoughts, memories, glimpses.

I think his dad had a roofing business, Tony's dad did, and I think that's what he was doing right after high school, laying tiles up above our heads, beneath the sun. Must have been hot up there. He was tough kid though, Tony was. He was probably pretty good at his work.

But --

Better to stop. Sometimes even glimpses are too much.

Just for a moment, for whatever reason, I thought about poor Tony (gone so soon!), about that point in time on a summer night long ago when we walked to get a shake, nothing on our minds but the taste of chocolate. I remembered it, I did, and then there was nothing else to do but grab onto the back of the moto and hang on tight and hope that the early-evening light would linger for a little while longer.

INEXPLICABLE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All of Cambodia's political elite were out in full force this morning for the wedding of Prime Minster Hun Sen's daughter. I know because I live right across the park from Hun Sen's palatial residence, and so this morning, while I waited for the van that conveniently picks me up and takes me to work, there was a parade of, oh, two hundred or so men and women slowly making their way down the closed-off streets, all clad in their Wednesday morning best, kissing the ass of the man who could crush their lives like an ant.

I know, I know. I'm being a bit harsh. I'm sure Hun Sen's daugther and her fiancee are kind, lovely people, wise and funny, deserving of their own, Cambodian version of Friends. And I'm sure all of the guests are just ecstatic to be there. Would willingly lay down their lives for the bride's father, no questions asked.

The thing is, weddings are weird here, as I discussed a week or so back. I haven't figured them out. Funerals either, for that matter. There's lots of people dressed really nice, in jewelry and gowns, traditional shirts and ceremonial gowns, and a lot sure happens, yes, morning processions and oh so much more, but I'm not entirely certain of what it all means.

Ah, but that's par for the course in a foreign country. You can't figure some things out. No. You can't figure most things out.

When I was kid, vacationing in Myrtle Beach or Florida, we could bop into a 7-Eleven and buy a can of Coke and that mother was big, I mean large, because the Canadian kind of cans were long, thin cylinders, but the American version was, like, angular, and thick, and why couldn't Canada get its act together like that? It eventually did, round about my ninth birthday. (All praises due to Allah.)

Coming from Canada to America, you noticed the small, little differences. (Like the fact that comics and books were a hell of a lot cheaper.)

Coming from Canada to, let's say, I don't know, Japan or Cambodia, you notice the big stuff. Right away. Straight in your face.

A lot of it has to do with the Asian approach to life and death, symbolized, for me, by weddings and funerals, with Hugh Grant nowhere in sight. Weddings are big and bold and glitzy and colourful; so are ones back home, true, but Asian ones have a certain, I don't know, inbred majesty to them. Maybe it's because I'm foreign, but they have a certain, solemn dignity that is inherent in the whole enterprise. (Of course it's contrived and insincere, but Asians at least present their insincerity a hell of a lot more effectively than those back home.)

It could be because I'm a hick Canadian, but one of the fundamental differences simply seems to be a view of life itself that is more mature, realistic, pragmatic, and yet, at the same time, undeniably mystical at its core. Myth and magic and superstition and tradition all seem to battle it out over here on a daily basis; they've been around, these people have, and hard-wired into their character seems to be this subtle, perhaps unnoticed approach to life that recognizes and validates its unknowable, uncontrollable nature.

Maybe that's b.s. I don't know. All I do know is that Asia -- meaning the parts I know, Japan and Cambodia -- seems to connect to something inherent in existence that we aren't connecting with back home. I can't put my finger on it, but it's there -- this elemental, inexplicable acknowledgement of life's glories and heartaches.

ONLY CURRENTS

What's that old saying? Five people killed in your neighbourhood is a tragedy; twenty-two thousand killed halfway around the world is a statistic.

Well, I guess I already am halfway around the world, and there were a heck of a lot of people killed right next door in Thailand, making it seem very unstatistic-like.

Events like this are too much to process -- the biggest earthquake in forty years, tectonic plates shifting, tens of thousands dead. Thousands more homeless. A grandson of the king of Thailand swept away on a jetski, while an Australian tourist loses his grip on his newborn as the waves fall down.

The brain can't handle that much tragedy at once. What are you supposed to do, and how are you supposed to take it all in? You can change the channel or put down the paper or surf to another website. There are worldwide tragedies all the time, of course, and this is but another one. Turn the page and disengage, as Rush once said. (The Canadian rock group, not the American commentator.)

(Oh, but how reckless and cruel we feel for doing that, don't we? I'm glad it's not me runs through your head and your heart, and you hate yourself for thinking it and feeling it, but it's there, and where does it come from, that selfish, instinctive gratefulness? That greedy thirst for life that allows us to feel for others misery but relish our own sanctuary? Does it makes us more or less human, this proper but craven desire?)

The strange thing about this is one is the indifferent naturalness of it. Terrorists you can almost understand. (Not condone; understand.) Meaning, angry, screwed-up people lashing out -- that's something that has an identifiable human texture and resolve. There are human motivations and psychological undercurrents you can analyze and dissect, poke and prope.

Here, there were only currents, period, unstoppable waves of force that went on and on and on for six kilometres at a stretch. A quake so powerful that it disturbed the earth's rotation.

Who do you get angry at? The weatherman for not predicting this development? The scientists for underestimating tsunamis? The earth for not being more, I don't know, sturdy?

I don't know. If you believe in God, these are the times when you wonder if He has a sick sense of humor or what. If you don't believe in him, you have little solace and even less comfort.

Random, consuming waves and quakes. Children tossed aside and flung away. The same old story of death and destruction, intensified to a horrifying degree.

Soon -- in a week, maybe two -- the story will die down, perhaps quietly, fading away from page one to seven to eight. Maybe another husband will kill his pretty and pregnant wife, and the media will find something else more sexy and racy and lurid to latch onto. In the real world, the sun will still set, the tide recede, the stars emerge. Everything will revert to what's considered normal.

This almost unspeakable human, personal tragedy will regress to a flat, emotionless statistic, or an indifferent afterthought, a 'remember-that-earthquake-last-year?' anecdote to be told sometime next Christmas, after the turkey, before the cake.

We can't be too hard on ourselves, I guess. It's natural (whether we like it or not) to grieve from a distance, and even more natural to move on, live life, look ahead. After all, there's only so much we are willing to hold on to. Only so much each of us can allow in.

What luxuries we have! To be able to move on, look ahead, turn away...

A CERTAIN POINT

Yesterday morning I was walking along the beach in Sihanoukville, marvelling at how still the water was compared to the day before -- no tide, no waves, no motion.

Not far away, disaster struck Thailand and southeast Asia, monstrous waves overwhelming people and cars and bungalows in one giant swoop. (I was about to say 'one fell swoop', but then I realized that I'm not sure I've ever understood what 'fell' means in that context.) Hundreds dead, swept away, submerged.

Unreal. And Cambodia, so close! Nothing. Hot sun and motionless water and light-brown sand, all untouched.

I had been thinking about going to Thailand over Christmas -- maybe to Bangkok, possibly to Phuket.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Is it up to us, these seemingly innocuous choices that spare us or condemn us? Is the Big Guy upstairs actually in charge of the weather patterns and the size of ocean waves and the thoughts that leads us from person to person, place to place? Or is it randomness itself that guides our lives, a benevolent energy, an actual tangible force that distributes death and smiles without fear or favor?

Not sure.

I stood on the beach yesterday, looking at the calm, blue water that stretched out, out, out, and I realized that this was one of those rare moments in life when everything at a certain point in time and space is at peace. When everything is stable. Nothing but water and sun and sand. Nothing but drift. Nothing but feet-in-sand and sky-up-above and blue, above all, blue, clear and distinct.

But it was just a moment.